Title British art and the East India Company / Geoff Quilley

Published Woodbridge, Suffolk : Boydell Press, 2020 ©2020

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Description 1 online resource (xvi, 350 pages) : illustrations (chiefly color) Series Worlds of the East India Company, 1752-5667 ; Volume 18 Worlds of the East India Company ; v. 18. 1752-5667 Contents Introduction: corporate patronage and Company artists -- 'That extensive commerce': the maritime image of the East India Company -- Travels in India: landscape and colonial patronage -- Networks of knowledge, power and cultural exchange -- The cries of India: colonial power, classification, and the diffusion of knowledge -- By way of China -- Collecting India -- Conclusion Summary This book examines the role of the East India Company in the production and development of British art during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when a new "school" of British art was in its formative stages with the foundation of exhibiting societies and the Royal Academy in 1768. It focuses on the Company's patronage, promotion and uses of art, both in Britain and in India and the Far East, and how the Company and its trade with the East were represented visually, through maritime imagery, landscape, genre painting and print-making. It also considers how, for artists such as William Hodges and Arthur William Devis, the East India Company, and its provision of a wealthy market in British India, provided opportunities for career advancement, through alignment with Company commercial principles. In this light, the book's main concern is to address the conflicted and ambiguous nature of art produced in the service of a corporation that was the "scandal of empire" for most of its existence, and how this has shaped and distorted our understanding of the history of British art in relation to the concomitant rise of Britain as a self-consciously commercial and maritime nation, whose prosperity relied upon global expansion, increasing colonialism and the development of mercantile organisations Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes Print version record Subject East India Company -- History SUBJECT East India Company fast Subject Art, British -- 18th century ART / History / General Art, British Genre/Form History Form Electronic book ISBN 9781787445437 1787445437

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